I don't look at the work of my contemporaries very much; I tend to look at pictures by dead artists. It's much easier to get near their paintings.
Howard Hodgkin

I don't very much enjoy looking at paintings in general. I know too much about them. I take them apart.
Georgia O'Keeffe

I experience a period of frightening clarity in those moments when nature is so beautiful. I am no longer sure of myself, and the paintings appear as in a dream.
Vincent Van Gogh

I feel like there's too many paintings left unpainted that I just don't want to take the time away.
Alan Bean

I find myself gravitating towards drama. It interests me. In the books I read, the paintings I like, it's always the darker stuff.
Naomi Watts

I had always loved expressionist painting, like every European. In fact I admired it all the more because these were precisely the paintings despised by my father's generation.
Georg Baselitz

I had rather see the portrait of a dog that I know, than all the allegorical paintings they can show me in the world.
Samuel Johnson

I had some money, I made the best paintings ever. I was completely reclusive, worked a lot, took a lot of drugs. I was awful to people.
Jean-Michel Basquiat

I have been surrounded by artists and paintings throughout my life. My father Ted Dyer is an artist, and from a very early age I have spent time painting and drawing.
John Dyer

I have no ideas about what the paintings imply about the world. I don't think that's a painter's business. He just paints paintings without a conscious reason.
Jasper Johns

I make paintings, try to get others to look at them and hopefully buy them.
Mike Thompson

I prefer to leave the paintings to speak for themselves.
Barnett Newman

I realize that protest paintings are not exactly in vogue, but I've done many.
Robert Indiana

I take this art very seriously and passionately. I love what I do. You can't help but grow. That's not to say you don't make mistakes or make bad choices, but that's part of the art. Painters paint bad paintings.
Christopher Meloni

I think most paintings are a record of the decisions that the artist made. I just perhaps make them a little clearer than some people have.
Chuck Close

I think of my peace paintings as one long poem, with each painting being a single stanza.
Robert Indiana

I think that has been a benefit to me because I think most people understand quilts and not a lot of people understand paintings. But yet they're looking at one.
Faith Ringgold

I will always find even the worst paintings that attempt some kind of representation better than the best invented paintings.
Balthus

I'd never painted anything before. I was quite content to take other people's work since I didn't care anyway about the subject matter. I approached subject matter as a scoundrel. I had nothing to say about it whatsoever. I only wanted to make these exciting paintings.
Tom Wesselmann

I'm not a lyric writer to make statements. What I enjoy doing is making paintings with lyrics, creating colorful images. I think that's more what entertainment and music should be.
Chris Cornell